ArticleDiagnostic pathology2022
Visual and digital assessment of Ki-67 in breast cancer tissue - a comparison of methods.
Article in Diagnostic pathology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Challenges and opportunities of implementing open-source digital pathology in sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons learned from deploying QuPath for breast cancer biomarker assessment in Cameroon.Journal of pathology informatics · 2026Article
- Optimization of Ki67 digital image analysis in breast cancer by automated tumor area identification.Virchows Archiv : an international journal of pathology · 2026Article
- Differential infiltration of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and expression of PD-L1 in paired biopsy and resection specimens of gastric and colorectal adenocarcinomas.Frontiers in oncology · 2026Article
- A Weakly Supervised Approach for HPV Status Prediction in Oropharyngeal Carcinoma from H&E-Stained Slides.Cancers · 2025Article
- Digital pathology in tau research: A comparison of QuPath and HALO.Journal of neuropathology and experimental neurology · 2025Article
- Comparing non-machine learning vs. machine learning methods for Ki67 scoring in gastrointestinal neuroendocrine tumors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Advancing Ki67 hotspot detection in breast cancer: a comparative analysis of automated digital image analysis algorithms.Histopathology · 2025Article
- High Ki67 expression, HER2 overexpression, and low progesterone receptor levels in high-grade DCIS: significant associations with clinical practice implications.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- The value of spectral CT quantitative parameters in predicting Ki-67 level in ovarian cancer.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- The Ki67 dilemma: investigating prognostic cut-offs and reproducibility for automated Ki67 scoring in breast cancer.Breast cancer research and treatment · 2024Article
- Malignant features of minipig melanomas prior to spontaneous regression.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Exploration of Digital Image Analysis for Ki67 Quantification in the Grading of Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma: A Pilot Study with 85 Cases.Head and neck pathology · 2023Article
- Obesity Associated with Prediabetes Increases the Risk of Breast Cancer Development and Progression-A Study on an Obese Rat Model with Impaired Glucose Tolerance.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn breast cancer (BC) Ki-67 cut-off levels, counting methods and inter- and intraobserver variation are still unresolved. To reduce inter-laboratory differences, it has been proposed that cut-off levels for Ki-67 should be determined based on the in-house median of 500 counted tumour cell nuclei. Digital image analysis (DIA) has been proposed as a means to standardize assessment of Ki-67 staining in tumour tissue. In this study we compared digital and visual assessment (VA) of Ki-67 protein expression levels in full-face sections from a consecutive series of BCs. The aim was to identify the number of tumour cells necessary to count in order to reflect the growth potential of a given tumour in both methods, as measured by tumour grade, mitotic count and patient outcome.
methodsA series of whole sections from 248 invasive carcinomas of no special type were immunohistochemically stained for Ki-67 and then assessed by VA and DIA. Five 100-cell increments were counted in hot spot areas using both VA and DIA. The median numbers of Ki-67 positive tumour cells were used to calculate cut-off levels for Low, Intermediate and High Ki-67 protein expression in both methods.
resultsWe found that the percentage of Ki-67 positive tumour cells was higher in DIA compared to VA (medians after 500 tumour cells counted were 22.3% for VA and 30% for DIA). While the median Ki-67% values remained largely unchanged across the 100-cell increments for VA, median values were highest in the first 1-200 cells counted using DIA. We also found that the DIA100 High group identified the largest proportion of histopathological grade 3 tumours 70/101 (69.3%).
conclusionsWe show that assessment of Ki-67 in breast tumours using DIA identifies a greater proportion of cases with high Ki-67 levels compared to VA of the same tumours. Furthermore, we show that diagnostic cut-off levels should be calibrated appropriately on the introduction of new methodology.
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